What about women’s driving ability, relative to men? Some delightful material there, I’m sure!
Post Content
Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/3/25
Hopefully by now you are all well acquainted with my beef with how comic strips depict the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but if you’re not, my beef is as follows: in real life, dogs pee on fire hydrants because they like to pee on vertical surfaces and fire hydrants are often a good place to let your dog do that so that they don’t do it on a tree or your neighbor’s house or whatever, and it’s weird that cartoon dogs treat them as a strong equivalent to toilets. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is particularly weird to me because of the way Grimm is like, “Oh no! I really have to pee, but the only object I could reasonably pee on, a fire hydrant, is nowhere to be found,” but looming in the middle of the panel is a mailbox, extremely visible but unmentioned in the dialogue, upon which in real life a dog would absolutely pee without a second thought. What exactly are we meant to take from this scene? Is it deliberately ambiguous, and we’re supposed to contemplate whether Grimm’s biological needs are going to outweigh his reticence to deface government property? Or is this simply the result of a sponsorship deal with the U.S. Postal Service, executed in one of the worst ways imaginable?
Mary Worth, 9/3/25
“Or are you thinking about mummifying your father and I after our deaths in the Egyptian fashion, removing our brains through our noses; then making an incision along our flanks with an Ethiopian stone blade so you can remove our organs and place them in canopic jars before rinsing our abdominal cavities with palm oil and filling them with spices; and then finally placing our preserved corpses in a massive pyramid built along the Hudson on the Upper West Side? Because that would be nice, actually.”
Pardon My Planet, 9/3/25
Pardon My Planet’s takes on women tend to be in the ballpark of “women love to demand expensive consumer goods from men,” so before today I would’ve encouraged an attempt to dig into women’s real thoughts and desires to find out what they actually want. But after seeing this panel, I gotta say: never try to do that again, because, Jesus Christ. Have you heard they like to shop? Maybe do some strips on that.
184 replies to “What about women’s driving ability, relative to men? Some delightful material there, I’m sure!”
MW:
“I lived a past life in Egypt. And you and Daddy were with me! — in fact, Daddy’s chosen profession was to be an expert on the meaning of the Egyptian symbol of life!”
“Nope. Don’t say it, Olive.”
“Yep. An ankhologist!”
MW:
“But I liked it best when one of the mummies ran into Brendan Fraser and chased him out of the museum!”
Pardon My Planet:
“With the kind of coy, arch male-bashing I do, I should be writing Judge Parker!”
MG and G:
“Commit a federal offense by feloniously damaging government property, or destroy my kidneys? — it’s a Hobson’s choice!”
MGG Sorry Folgers, but the best part of waking up for me now is seeing a cartoon dog grabbing his junk.
MW A girl with psychic powers goes to Egypt to visit ancient myatical temples? Doesn’t feel like the typical Mary Worth plot but I’m down for it!
PmP Weird animal sex play stuff aside, it’s his ass, girl. You’re smelling his ass.
RMMD: ‘Oh Cody… my husband’s going to snap your neck now, and I will be so happy when he does.’
SF: See Jules? THAT’s how you update Mark Trail’s design for the modern era!
PmP:
Answer: How to describe Furry cunnilingus without breaking character.
Question: Sorry I asked.
Maybe it’s just the MG&G team’s subtle way of saying they’re just mailing it in today.
MG and G: There’s a nice wall right there. I guess Grimm has never seen the album cover for “Who’s Next.”
JP: so what that April may be dead and Randy’s in prison. Just a year ago Alan, you were having a hissy fit that you missed your granddaughter and now you get to raise her (at least until her mom mysteriously reappears in the night as is the custom in that family.)
FG: Fria does not look like she wants to talk peace.
GT: don’t forget to sprinkle it with powdered sugar before handing it to the customer.
MW: uh oh. If Olive goes to Egyptian pyramid, shell surely come back with an evil Spirit.
PMP: Congratulations to Pardon My Planet, winner of this year’s “Most Graphic Description of Cunnilingus in the Funny Pages” award. Commiserations to the losers – sorry Blondie, your depictions of Dagwood’s fantasies of “eating” his wife’s “sandwich” just weren’t quite eroticised enough this time.
Grimm: Actiually, the joke is that his house is burning down, and if he can’t find a hydrant, Mother Goose will die. He also needs to urinate, but that’s unrelated to the joke.
Pardon My Planet:
“I’m going as anthropologist Margaret Mead for Halloween! — how about you two ladies?”
MW: How long is this Olive-fest going to continue? I don’t CARE what Olive did, or what she likes, or what she wants. I think Ed and Evy should talk about how they spent THEIR day. Maybe Olive would REALLY learn something…!
Beetle Bailey : …shouldn’t the MAIN CHARACTER be the one made the focus, with him going against the grain in opposition to the rest of the cast? …This is why, when your comic is about the main character being a dimwitted bumbler, you don’t introduce another character who’s stupider and more mistake-prone!
************
Between Friends : And blonde friend, having a negative attitude about the job, becomes an even bigger tyrant that DeClan ever was.
*************
Frazz : You broke your leg unicycling and spent the rest of the summer preparing for that race against Mrs Olsen. You definitely weren’t doing any work.
************
Moose & Molly :
a) this is the kind of stuff that jury selection, and alternate jurors that can be switched in, is supposed to prevent, right?
b) Shouldn’t he be addressed by “Juror Number [X]”? Like, don’t tell the defendant that’s Moose Miller, your honor, he probably knows him personally!
**********
Pardon my Planet : “Of course, sometimes we switch roles, except when *I* do it, I don’t bury my nose in the GROUND…. It’s somewhere very brown, yes, but it’s not dirt…”
Normally, I’d say “Too far?”, but today I have to say “Oversnarkpologies”***********
Slylock Fox : EXTRA DIFFERENCE : in the image on the left, the dog is voiced by Bill Farmer. A-HYUCK!
MW: “Mary, we’ll pay you to take a trip to Egypt with, um, what’s her name again…oh, yeah, OLIVE!”
DtM: OK, everyone, STOP FEEDING DENNIS. He’ll leave, starve or learn to make sandwiches.
RMMD: Cody should leave now. Anyone else would leave. But will Cody leave? No, Cody will not.
PMP: When homonym-based gags go WAY off the rail.
MW: Woah, calm down there and speak in complete sentences, Olive, you’re about to blow a pit.
MW:
“Listen, kid. If you want to engage in socially-acceptable thanatopsis, instead of obsessing about all of that, why don’t you just go listen to Eleanor Rigby?”
“I love Egyptian antiquities!”
“Would you like to visit Egypt? Because it is very expensive and I am not sure we can afford it”
“Fine, I’ll visit London”
“Hotels are incredibly expensive there, aim lower!”
“Paris?”
“Let’s settle on Turin
I mean, I guess I appreciate a take on “men are pigs” that I’ve never seen before, but on the other hand… no, no I don’t appreciate it, swing and a miss, Pardon my planet (or should I say, swine and a miss). (I shouldn’t. I’ll go now.)
Fire departments are usually a competence of local government, while the post service is a federal institution. Is being willing to piss on fire hydrants but not mailboxes a celebration of centralised power against the wishes of the framers or an indication that local government is more responsive to the natural needs of citizens? In this essay…
Editor: “Have you made that joke based on the fact that ‘smell’ can mean both ’emitting odours’ and ‘perceiving odours’?”
Cartoonist: “Sure did boss, real fuckin sexy just like you asked.”
Editor: “what”
PHANTOM: Sure, to a hammer every problem is a nail daring to be aise it’s head.
6CX: hope that sadsack appreciates his buddy!
MW: The corpses, mother. It is the corpses which draw me to the museum, day after day. Through my second sight, I can’t help but see everyone* decaying around me. But the mummies lie still, preserved, proof that even death beyond death can have its terminus.
*(except for Mary Worth, the Ageless One)
@Activist:
#22 correction. PHANTOM: daring to raise its head
“Maybe it’s the animal in me talking, but I am bacon”
Pardon My Planet: A coworker recently explained to me that her necklace was actually a “day collar” (you don’t have to know what it is to know what it is) and that she was in a dom-sub relationship with her longtime boyfriend. As she told us more about the relationship, I realized it was just another way of expressing a pretty normal arrangement with one strong partner and one who allowed herself to be led, plus some freaky shit in the bedroom. All of which is to say, you go girl, but maybe not in front of God, your unwilling friends, and the entire world of the comics page?
Mother Goose and Grimm: It costs 74 cents to mail a single letter these days! 74 cents! Curse you, inflation! Curse you, rising operational costs! Curse you, mandated pre-payment of pension costs! The dog would be right to pee on your boxes, U.S. Postal Ser—[PRN Haldol is administered, funny pages removed from room]
Big Ancient Egyptian theme, as Olive rhapsodizes about mummies, PmP woman wears an ankh pendant, and Grimm is an ancient Mut.
Mary Worth: “Yes, Mother, I would like to go to Egypt someday, and there bend an entire rich and productive national economy to my needs…” (glances at Mary, who nods) “…while subjugating an entire class of people and forcing them to fashion bricks. For my tummy brain.”
You know, if that lady’s husband is an actual dog, I say good for her, to each his own, who am I to judge? Just hope she cleans up after him when he shits on the sidewalk.
I was going to say “Turns out Pardon My Planet gets its ideas of what and how women think from Six Chix“, but Six Chix isn’t as big on bestiality as I thought. The Chix tend to be either sane enough to want at least some humanoid qualities or in one case, their tastes run much, much weirder.
JP Remember, this is the strip that had “estranged daughter hides out in basement for months and nobody even talks to her about whether she did or didn’t kill the guy she’s suspected of murdering”. Whatever they’re leading to will be much, much more stupid than “April is still missing and Randy is locked up for non-cooperation”. With the way they seem to want to run an action strip, we’ll probably segue to Randy completing his mystical Norwegian training and heading off to find April and then take down the Bad Guys. Including most of the CIA. (No, it will be dumber than even that.)
Pluggers need to make more bathroom visits as they get older. No one else can say that!
Queen Narcititi is bored with being praised in English and wishes to be praised in Arabic for a change.
PMP — Just Circe having Wednesday morning coffee with her girls. Or there’s a time shift and she’s Married to Marvin.
MW — Olive’s Mom blithely ignores the subtextual clues. A girl starved of human affection is fascinated by “Mummies” and fantasizes about burying her dead family members, and all blondie can say is “Would you like to go to Egypt?”
Circe, burned once too many times by cads like Odysseus, finally settles down with a good man and leaves the lonely shores of Aeaea for the brunches of New York City. Still, from time to time, and with her husband’s enthusiastic consent, she turns him into a pig, for old time’s sake.
MG&G: Forget the mailbox, there’s a perfectly good brick wall right there!
MW: “Of course! But I’ll settle for going to Santa Royale for some reason.”
PMP: This is an interesting take on Edda Burber.
MG&G – WtF – too good to piss on the USPS? Well, I’m not gonna sit here while you demean the USA like that….
MW – No…but I do have an urge to slip into your bedroom tonight, and fish your brain out of your nose with hooks and keep ‘em in a jar in my closet….
PMP – I can’t believe some women don’t verify their mates with an extensive butt sniffing….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: I called this a few days ago. Get ready for an eight-week arc of the past lives of Olive, Mary, and other Charterstone regulars in ancient Egypt. Though I don’t know how you’d get ready for that.
MW: Mary’s pyramid scheme takes a wrong turn when the folks take her literally.
Okay, now Mary Worth is getting interesting. The strip where Mary walks in on Olive practising ancient Egyptian burial techniques on her bullying classmates is going to be an all-timer.
FC: “OK, sure.” {two seconds later} “No! Don’t sit on it!”
Dustin: Josh, you should go to Dustin for your “Women be… ” material! Today, it’s “women be trying to force their asshole husbands to eat healthy to prolong their husbands’ lives for some horribly misguided reason.”
Blondie: My go-to excuse is “I’m sorry, I have to rearrange my sock drawer.”
Luann: When they eventually do an EEG for Luann, they’re going to find out she has a negative number of neurons.
CS: Later, his entire class disappears just because they didn’t want to be there. There were no supernatural shenanigans in that case.
9CL: If she spoke for God in that way, Amos definitely would have been smote by now.
PMP: IKEA’s hilarious “Chase the Piggie” commercial (it aired in Europe) seems to have been the inspiration for today’s panel.
IKEA did it better.
MW: Evy isn’t making eye contact with her unholy spawn for fear of imprinting on it. You can’t grow attached to something you refuse to acknowledge. That or she’s afraid of being sent to the cornfield or turned into some unholy abomination.
DT: So, it is not just business with LaKoyle, but personal! Watch out Dick!
JP: This situation reminds me of a joke. Golfer goes to the local Pro and asks about improving his game. Pro says, okay, let’s play 9 holes so I can see what you got. They play 9 holes and head back to the clubhouse. The Golfer eager to know what he needs to do to improve: “Is it my backswing? Do I need to keep my head down? Is it my follow through.” The Pro says, “you need to take 1 month off from playing -” Golfer, interrupting “- is that to clear my mind, and let my muscle memory reset?” The Pro continues “and then after a month off, you should quit completely”.
After two months, it is clear the creators just hope this whole spy thing would go away, and if they ignore it maybe the readership will as well.
MW: Mummification is a good concept. The plot is already well dessicated.
RMMD: Yes, Cody, you did a bad thing and you should feel bad.
GT: Please let the local food inspector close them down for selling food without a license, not having proper grease disposal and not wearing hair nets!
MW: Ed tries to explain to Mary the difference between schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia. “I know it’s confusing to the layman, Mary; but really, all you have to remember is Olive is nuts.”
Dog urine is very corrosive, and damaging a mail box can land you three years in prison in the U.S. Ain’t no way Grimmy is taking a 21 dog-year stint in the Federal penitentiary when he can look for a nice fire hydrant.
Plot twist: glasses woman is a chef and married an actual truffle-hunting pig for his truffle-hunting abilities. She’s saved so much money over the years!
Servants of early pharoahs were killed and entombed with their monarchs to continue serving them in the afterlife. When Mary dies, Olive will have the Charterstone residents build a necropolis in the parking lot for her, and then have them buried with her, so in eternity she will have no shortage of acolytes to advise. Except for Wilbur, of course – she has standards.
MW: For someone fascinated by mummies, Olive sure does seem sad to be talking about them with…her mummy.
GET IT. SEE WHAT I DID THERE.
Mother Goose and Grimm – Grimm is posing a vague threat to the Post Office in order to get put on the next edition of “Comic Strip Classics” stamps.
Mary Worth – With a great need to “prove” her psychic powers to the world, Olive will kill and mummify the mean girls that teased her in an accurate ceremony like the Ancient Egyptians (including her in a past life) did. Vicki will be spared, but will be racked with survivor’s guilt. When Olive is given multiple life sentences, she, in her homicidal narcissism, will take it literally and fall into despair.
Pardon My Planet – When the Animacalypse hits the rest of us will be losing our minds, while the blonde woman, her husband, and their shared kinks willl thrive.
MW: Olive thinks the sun rises and sets just for her, of course she’d feel a certain kinship with the pharaohs. Naomi’s smart to keep away from her; anyone in Olive’s circle is bound to wind up entombed with her to continue serving her in the afterlife.
MG&G: Never mind the mailbox, there’s a wall right there! I doubt Grimm would be the first dog to use it as a toilet. Hell, odds are pretty good that a few humans have used it for a toilet.
@Tonio:
Wilbur has established that he’s cursed with the inability to be killed, and the rest of Charterstone must deal with him as punishment for their own sins.
That’s not Olive’s mom. Mary is going the extra mile to encourage Olive’s interests, acting out the myth of Khonsu, aging and becoming young again with the phases of the moon.
CS: Instead of publishing this article that for some reason needs at least 3 separate interviews, what if Skip went rouge and ran a libelous story about how Batton is part of a cult, or is a flasher or something? Sure, he’d get sued and put out of business, but if this is the best his paper can do, how long will he stay in business, anyway? This way, at least someone might bother to read it.
Pardon My Planet-And by ground you mean your vagina?
RMMD-“If only I had left sooner instead of sitting around in my car.”
MW-Olive’s parents will send her to Egypt as cargo.
Archie-“I’ll give Moose a call.” A funny smile then crosses Midge’s face.
C’shaft: Now, I’m not a big time comic strip artist whose life story is obviously worth recounting in painstaking detail through a thinly disguised proxy character, but it seems to me that this would be a good place to employ the visual aspect of the medium by showing some humorous result of young Battom’s fatigue–falling asleep at his desk, perhaps, or rinsing his paintbrush in his coffee. But hey, I’m sure you know what you’re doing with settling on a vague, dazed look; it does reflect the reaction of the audience.
DT: Damn, do all the hot lesbian criminals know one another?
Dustin: Like Charles Dickens, I firmly believe that it’s good for adults to be children sometimes. Dress up for Halloween, take a turn on the swing set during your break, whatever; life is short and joy and wonder are hard to come by in this day and age. But there is something inherently pathetic about a middle-aged man who insists on eating chocolate cereal in the morning. You just know Dustdad hasn’t developed the skill to make waffles or even heat up a goddamn Pop-Tart on his own behalf.
FG: I may be jumping into this at the wrong time. There’s a lot of characters and backstory flying about.
Luann: “But to answer your question, yes.”
It’s always a little confusing and unsettling when an anthropomorphic cartoon animal keeps another creature as a pet, but the reveal that this fully sapient dog-man isn’t allowed to use the public bathrooms presumably available to his goose-woman owner is outright dystopian.
@Rover Berkeley:
When Skip brought back the Centerville Sentinel, he had that massive spiel about how he was doing REAL journalism that spoke truth to power… And this is what, his FIFTH lunch interview with Batton Thomas, and they STILL haven’t gotten past “here’s a funny anecdote from when I was just starting out”.
And this week is a particularly weak “They tell you ‘Don’t quit your dayjob’, but no one tells you that keeping your dayjob on top of your entertainer job means you’re working two jobs!” I (almost) long for “When I was a kid, I thought the printing mill in my hometown was literally a comic book factory”.
Phantom: Suddenly, I have a craving for some nice freshly-baked brattttaaattaa.
@TheDiva: re: FG: Naw, you’ll be fine. You just have to remember that everyone aside from the protagonists is a lousy, backstabbing sneak. Also that Dale will be kidnapped at least twice a month.
And how about that “Frigian champion,” eh? Holy Errol Flynn, hubba hubba!
@treetown:
JP-The spy storyline is the writer’s go to when they can’t think of any other story.
PMP – Ok, is “ground” supposed to be a euphemism? Because if it is, this makes some kind of kinky sense.
Mary Worth: Not a fan at all of the potential implications behind Olive’s mom looking exactly like Mary wearing a blonde wig.
Pardon My Planet: Its not often that a comic strip leaves me utterly speechless, but this is definitely such a time.
Luann-“What? I’m dumber than a dolphin?” That’s an understatement, Luann.
@Anonymous:
#14. Anon, first time is ve read M&M, thanks for i.plied recommendation.
And in BF, Susan needs to put her big girl pants on. You were given the blessings of an actual choice! When we make a choice, there’s always an opportunity cost.
JP: Kind of interesting: Two recent college graduates go wild in Norwegian suburb.
Less interesting: Judge Randy confronts Lemonpuss down at the ol’ CIA headquarters.
Way less interesting: Charlotte cries for mommy; Judge Alan bursts into tears like a little bitch.
So. We’ve had three days in a row of….
BF: Yeah, yeah. Two weeks of hawking coffee vodka to bored Toronto housewives and you’ll be bitchin’ and moanin’ about THAT job.
On Luann : I’m willing to bet Bernice DIDN’T want to console/reassure Luann, and that she was, in fact, trying to say “Actually, dolphins’ brains are less complex, so the average human* is smarter than a dolphin” in a super-complicated way so Luann wouldn’t understand/think she was saying the opposite, but Bernice so jealously guards her status as “the smartest person in the room” she couldn’t help herself from prefacing it with a categorical “No. (dolphins are NOT smarter than me)”, meaning Luann understood anyway.
*this excludes Luann, who is below average anyway.
@taig: @taig:
MW: No, I want to go to Santa Royale, where you can see walking, talking geriatric mummies!
Well, PMP several times showed that cows walk on two legs and speak the human language.
Maybe she’s married to an anthropomorphic dog (pig?) guy who genuinely works for a living and treats her very well.
You know what? Who knows? I’m not going to analyze this anymore.
PMP: There was a Robot Chicken parody of The Golden Girls crossed over with Sex and the City, which showed the four women in a restaurant talking about their sex lives. While a guy at the table next to them was desperate to get out of there “Check please! CHECK PLEASE!!”
Just saying, that Pardon my Planet proves that somehow, there is no limit to how much more uncomfortable one can make a scenario.
PMP: Nope. Not gonna take the bait.
MG&G: That’s a little alarming. What does the city do when a building is on fire?
MG&G: Grimm would only urinate on the wall if “Clapton is God!” was written there.
PMP: Expect a Cease & Desist order from the legal team at 9 Chickweed Lane.
Now we know why the working title for this laughing square was “Pardon My Perversions”
Why wouldn’t one let a dog pee on a tree?
MG&G – This is just Grimm nervously admitting that his latest foray into arson has gone farther than he intended.
MW – “Do you want to go to Egypt now? I could buy you a plane ticket. Let me just get my phone.”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Monin imitates Don Abundio”
“Yes, and he’s good at it!”
“I know”
“Why can’t we work for him instead?”
“like a piglet on a truffle hunt.” I mean, that’s what we call it, if you catch my drift.
If the USPS isn’t good enough to handle dog piss, I’m certainly not going to trust them with my mail!
love is… cosplaying “The Maid and The Butler”.
Fred Basset Spanish to English.
Bacön: Don’t click this link. Really, don’t click it.
NEW COMIC at GoComics.
MW: “Olive, what was your favorite part of the museum visit?” “Oh, I gotta go with all the stone dicks. So many statues! So many dicks! All of them rock hard!”
Luann: Yes. But to her defense, so are most people in general.
Crank: It’s been implicit with Les Moore for decades, of course, but I’m super excited that “Batty’s author avatars who are teachers are really bad at it, because their own artistic glory is more important than moulding young minds or whatever” is now official canon.
DT: I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again: It’s always a mistake when a storyline that’s failing to make any sense whatsoever reminds us about a better storyline. Reminding us about X. Libris, on the other hand, is probably fine.
JP: “It would probably help if the writer had figured out what’s actually happened to them!”
MW: Olive’s plans for her own Egyptian funeral don’t just involve being mummified, but the Mean Girls to be killed and also mummified to serve her in the next world.
Pluggers: I always hesitate to admit I identify with a Pluggers, and I should probably hesitate further for one like this, but honestly, for years now, I’ve had dreams where I’m attending a convention, or back at uni for some reason, or visiting a new city, or whatever, and my primary concern in the dream is trying to remember where the loos are. And then I wake up, go to the bathroom, go back to sleep, and the dream continues, only now my primary concern is finding somewhere to have breakfast.
PMP: Oh, good grief, I was so distracted by the sheer what-the-effery that it took me three goes to realise there’s an actual joke buried in there, and it’s basically a spin on “My dog’s got no nose”. Wasn’t worth the effort.
RMMD: Tomorrow is going to be “This isn’t your fault for going to see him after I specifically told you it was a bad idea and he didn’t want to see you — it’s his fault for not wanting to see you!” isn’t it?
SH: I’m pretty sure the answer to the question “When you breathe out, do you need to be subconciously aware where your nasal passages lead in order to know where you’re breathing out, otherwise you’ll try to send the air down a dead end?” is no, but I resent that I’ve even had to think about it. (And will probably continue thinking about it every time I breathe for the rest of the evening.)
@Sequitur:
The Anti-Dustin?
@Anonymous: #14: re-BB:
“you don’t introduce a character who’s stupider and more mistake-prone”
Strangely, Mort Walker tried that in the late 60s and quickly realized his mistake. He introduced Ozone, a hulking galoot even stupider than Zero, figuring twice the stupidity equalled twice the laughs. It didn’t take him long to realize that Ozone was superfluous and didn’t add to the humor, so down the memory hole went the character.
Committing the crime of defacing government property would detract from Grimm’s alter ego, U.S. Male, nightly defender of Truth and Justice!
See, Mother Goose & Grimm, I, too, can have absolutely nothing, but post a joke, anyway!
CS: For some reason the last panel reminds me of an old Mr. Boffo cartoon, where after a young Picasso sells his first piece of art, his dad warns him not to quit his day job just yet.
MG&G: Credit where it’s due, that is a really detailed drawing of the USPS logo. Bummer it has to share panel space with a pee joke, but whaddaya gonna do.
(Side note: please tell me I’m not the only one who didn’t know that the USPS logo is based off an eagle?
PMP: Well at least it distracts from the lady on the right, who appears to be fused to her chair.
“But I can’t help being fascinated by them! The Mameluk period, the Ottoman Suzerainty, their defeat at Tel-El-Kebir by Sir Garnet Wolsley’s daring night attack, the wanton misrule of King Farouk – ”
“Look, kid, just say fucking pyramids, okay? Pyramids.”
@The Man With The Plan:
What…what did you think the logo was?
@A Grave Mind: “Cleopatra? She was a goddamn Ptolemy, a Greek, you hear me, a fucking Greek!”
@Ettorre: I got to make a research visit to Turin’s Museo Egizio this past summer, and it was a great experience. I’ve never been to Egypt, though. Someday…
Zits Spanish to English.
PMP: Why does the speaker have glasses with only one lens? Is it a recurring character thing or somehow part of the joke? I’ve been thinking about it but can’t tell. Mostly because I don’t want to risk looking into it but am still desperate to think about anything other than what she’s saying, but still.
The “I smell- with my NOSE” joke is the oldest dad-joke in the book, but Pardon my Planet has raised it to the level of erotic fiction, and I don’t think I care for it.
Pardon My Perversions : Phyllis Stein is upset nobody noticed her dress was signed by The Artist Formally Known as Prince.
MG and G:
“Hey, I’m a bowdlerized comic strip character! — so, um, what am I doing covering up, and what exactly am I covering, anyway?”
@Liam: I wonder if it is old excuse borrowed from the espionage world. “the public only knows of the failures and almost never the success.” So on JP we only see the failed spy plots and not all of the successful ones where April slips away from Randy and returns with everyone thinking she went to some convention.
Hamburger Guy: Likes Sleep! Crankshaft, once again, you show us the way.
@Voshkod: #99: But she was the only one of the Ptolemaic Dynasty who bothered learning to read and write heiroglyphics.
And finally, Gil Thorp, reminding us all of every time we lined up to buy cirrhois-ravaged human livers. This strip is about to join Intelligent Life.
@Guillermo el chiclero: She tried to be an Egyptian, and was a good politician and schemer, and probably the best Ptolemy since Ptolemy I, but that’s not a high bar.
@Voshkod:
Soooooo much incest.
@A Grave Mind:
Not an eagle, that’s for sure.
@The Man With The Plan:
A penguin? The Concorde? A plague doctor?
@Anonymous: Beetle Bailey : …shouldn’t the MAIN CHARACTER be the one made the focus, with him going against the grain in opposition to the rest of the cast?
To be fair (and I can’t believe I’m saying this in defense of this crappy comic strip) Beetle IS going against the grain. If you look closely you’ll notice that he’s out of step with the other characters. I didn’t even know the strip was capable of that kind of subtlety.
MW: Olive is especially interested in the part where you take the person’s brain out through their nostrils. But don’t worry. With the company she keeps, that’s not something she’ll have the opportunity to actually do.
PMP: I really wish this were a two-panel or divided panel strip so we could see the bespectacled blonde sitting alone at the table ten seconds later.
Late Thread Cuisine: Enough American food; how about some Japanese?
@Baja Gaijin:
The Japanese have still-alive octopus and a drink that’s basically Cheez Whiz, served ice cold. There is much to target here.
MW: When did Toby become Olive’s mother?
@Baja Gaijin: I’ve had Pizza Hut on 4 continents. This picture doesn’t deter me one bit.
OTF — This mirrors my own company quite a bit, because rank-n-file here got RTW orders this week. Doesn’t matter to me, since I’ve been working at least 4 days a week in office for the last 2.5 years… but I will admit that I haven’t seen my company’s version of Rose in the office for awhile now.
@Ettorre, @Pak-Man: Oh! I did not realize that was going on in this cartoon until I read your comments. Maybe I was just too distracted by the grotesqueness of it all.
Now I want a second panel where the other women do “My husband has no nose.” “How does he smell?” “Terrible!”
C-Shaft: He was teaching an eight-year-old who already looked like Ed Crankshaft. You’re never rested enough for that.
DT: One absolutely delightful idea is that all the top scholars at Choate Rosemary Hall, one of our most exclusive prep schools, are becoming Dick Tracy villains after college. It’s the best news I’ve heard about education in America for some time.
GT: I’d feel better about these popovers if the Atazhoon siblings hadn’t used a black plastic disposable fork in preparing them. Not really something that deals well with high heat.
HtH: Lucky Eddie has chosen to deal with the heat by stripping down to his skivvies. His rotund boss continues to walk around in full tunic and bearskin. You’d think the resulting smell would keep the bullies away.
JP: Maybe that response can be “Hey, funny story…”
Luann: Bernice thinks that “cerebrumal” is a word so take it with a grain of salt and be ready to jump for fish.
Phantom: To their credit, though, a couple of them are getting more creative when it comes to sound FX.
Gil Thorp: I don’t think I’ve ever posted a Late Thread Cuisine as disgustingly revolting as the central panel of this strip.
@116 Baja Gaijin:
A hen jumped over the pizza and dropped an egg half way over.
If anyone had pizza jumping hens it would probably be the Japanese.
@Horace Broon: Re SH: I’m just glad the dialog informed me that they were human now. In the guy’s case, at least, I could have spent all night wondering what the hell he was supposed to be.
@Sequitur: And those hens would probably be sold from a vendo (because that’s also a Japanese thing).
@Artist formerly known as Ben: He’s a mouse.
No, I’m not kidding.
Gil Thorp — Just looked back at yesterday’s strip as well… panel 2 is supposed to be a “pop-over”?
@Baja Gaijin: Interesting-looking pizza. I’d have to find out more about what all the bits and pieces are before I said yea or nay to it.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: Ah. Not a regular reader. The only Holbrook strip I see other than when Horace comments on it is On the Fastrack. For some reason.
Yes, viewing this edition of Pardon My Planet has made my day objectively worse. As a joke, as a social commentary, as a piece of visual art, in all ways a strong net negative. The one small silver lining, though not nearly enough to balance it out, is that “piglet on a truffle hunt” is now my new favorite bit of rhyming slang.
@Sequitur: No problem.
@132 Not your average Joe:
Thank you.
@Baja Gaijin: I’m sure it’s delightful.
@Baja Gaijin: The sizzle is from when she dragged it out of Hell.
@Artist formerly known as Ben: Let me give you the lowdown. The guy is a mouse, who is married to that lady who is actually a canary. They live with that cat (who is the spawn of a dog, I think). The little girl is their child, who is more or less one of the few actual humans in this strip. They just spent the summer living in the ocean as sea creatures with the mermaids.
For the record, this strip was, IMHO, funny and poignant when I started reading it in college. Not as much DNA-mashing back then.
@119 Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: Half of the round pizza contains mayonnaise.
@124 Sequitur: Autumn bring the “moon watching” season. Fried eggs look like the moon, sorta. So the Japanese crack eggs atop inappropriate foods to make them autumnal, much like Americans shove pumpkin spice into everything just about now.
@126 Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: I think I saw one of those in the sticks in Aomori prefecture. Right next to a Coca-Cola vendo.
@129 Artist formerly known as Ben: It’s “Pork Tsukimi Pizza / Mayo Chicken Tsukimi Pizza Half & Half”. One half is garlic/green pepper/charcoal-grilled black pork from Kagoshima Prefecture, the other half is flame-grilled teriyaki chicken and a rich mayonnaise sauce. All that topped by cheese and a pair of eggs. Yum yuuuuumm.
@134 taig: It probably is. See the ingredients list above. Except for the eggs, I’d be all over it.
@135 taig: By “Hell” do you mean she yanked it right of the devil’s steaming ass? I’d agree with that assessment.
@Baja Gaijin: Now that looks like it might actually be good!
@Baja Gaijin: Whatever it is it’s still better than deep fried deflated footballs they’re serving over at Gil Thorp.
@Baja Gaijin: “Whatcha barbecuing?” “Gibbering mouther!” “Uh…”
@139 Lord Flatulence: And may make you live up to your name!
@140 Anonymous: Had I read Gil Thorp before posting the Cuisine, I would have posted a link to Gil Thorp instead. Man, that’s some seriously hideous foodlike product. It’s inspired me to do a Late Thread Mashup.
@Baja Gaijin:
At least it’s not a pumpkin spice egg…. That’s tomorrow’s LTC isn’t it?
@143 Anonymous: Ummm, not NOW. Thanks for spoiling it. I have to look for something else.
Late Thread Mashup: The missing final panel that really should have been included.
MW: Hey Olive, why don’t you just ask Ida Knowe to take you to Egypt? Oh, you don’t have an Ida Knowe? Sorry Olive, you’re actually less special than the kids from Gasoline Alley.
@A Grave Mind: Wasn’t that the elevator pitch for 9CL?
@137 Baja Gaijin:
Since you mentioned pumpkin spice, I’ll go ahead and drop this oldie goldie.
@145 Baja Gaijin:
Nailed it!
@148 Sequitur: A good one!
@149 Sequitur: Thanks.
@Baja Gaijin: The pizza doesn’t look so bad, but it shouldn’t be served with a Snail Cone on the side.
Say what you will about “Pardon My Planet”–and I think you did–the lady on the left absolutely nails the expression you have when someone tells you something you never wanted to know and will never be able to forget.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: So many questions, and I’m not going to ask a single one of them.
PARDON MY PLANET: Piglets are not used to hunt truffles. The hog hunters of truffles are mature sows, because truffles smell like the pheromones of male pigs. Except that hogs are generally not used for truffle-hunting these days. Hogs are too damaging to the truffles and the landscape. They have been mostly replaced by dogs. And now I shall endeavor to forget today’s strip, probably unsuccessfully.
@Baja Gaijin: I certainly hope so. I have my reputation to maintain.
@Ukulele Ike: * In the Bandar tongue.
@Baja Gaijin: With corn? I do see corn, right?? One of my sisters did a Rotary exchange to Japan decades ago and mailed back a local pizza place’s menu with a note that so. many. pizzas were made with corn on them.
@Poteet: Dave Barry had a column on truffle-hunting pigs back in the day. TL;DR… you send out the pigs, they find the truffles, you fire an automatic weapon to get the pigs to drop said truffles, you serve the truffles to snooty guests, and the guests thank you by saying “Hey! Theses are just cigarette butts drenched in pig saliva!”
Phantom: Or the two minute hate.
@Baja Gaijin: Your final panel really is excellent, but it wasn’t really…um…neede…*runs for the bathroom*
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: Thanks to you, Dave Barry, and PmP, today’s strip is now definitely cemented in my mind. Yay.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: Seattle Times put a later strip in instead of Monday. The popovers are fry bread, and they’re going to talk about its development during the Navajo’s forced “Long Walk”. Fry bread should be irregular … but maybe not to the point of being confused with a mad scientist’s artificially-enlarged amoebas
@TheDiva: DT: Yes, it’s definitely time to ship Theresa Koyle and Xavira Libris.
@Artist formerly known as Ben: re: DT: Also impressive is that Choate — alma mater of such American luminaries as Adlai Stevenson, Edward Albee, and Ivanka Trump — is also responsible for our latest generation of stinking rich book collectors and electrical death-ray tinkerers.
@Voshkod: I thought it was “All fucking, all the time.”
@151 Peanut Gallery: That’s a sweet pizza you vulgar beefwit! It’s crispy pizza dough made with Gion Tsujiri matcha, filled with matcha paste and shiratama, with mozzarella cheese and cream cheese. Shiratma are small, chewy dumplings made from glutinous rice flour.
@157 CanuckDownSouth: Not corn. Those are bell pepper bits on the pork half of the pie.
@160 Poteet: Be glad I didn’t use the other idea I had. It involved “devils” and “rectums.”
I believe we are now at the turning point where the strip will become “Mary Worth and Olive, Mummy Queen of Egypt,” taking on an entirely new setting and cast of characters, with Mary only making occasional appearances alongside Wilbur’s grandson, Lil’ Wilby.
@166 Baja Gaijin:
Would that be the one where someone eats a big pile of deviled eggs and poops them out into a pizza shell?
You got to bake th’ hell out of it.
@168 Sequitur: Not quite. Poteet commented on my Gil Thorp mashup. No pizza involved. Think more of “devils”, “rectums”, and “pulling”.
@169 Baja Gaijin:
Ah! The ol’ “Constipation” game.
@Baja Gaijin: You’re talking about an artist who has difficulty with the human face, so it’s a bit unfair to expect well-rendered foods.
Baja! There’s some almost food-like stuff in today’s Lio.
@171 Ken: ‘Tis true, though this is a bit worse than the ever-changing human faces.
@172 Sequitur: There goes tomorrow’s Late Thread Cuisine. Harrumph!
Sally Forth-Is that the Mandolorian as Hillary’s teacher??? Dad is gonna lose his star wars universe mind!
@174 Late night lurker:
You still lurking? If so I’m giving you a present. Thursday’s Sally Forth.
@Sequitur: I dusted off the Buddy Hackett joke bible for this one: What do you call a vegetarian with diarrhea? A salad shooter!
@176 Dennis Jimenez:
And then this.
@Ukulele Ike: Yes, it must have a very well-rounded curriculum.
Who will be the new spokes character for Cologuard™, The box you poop in and mail to the lab, Grimmy or Marvin?
@179 GarrisonSkunk: Anyone who ate what’s being served in Gil Thorpland.
Boy, Thursday’s Mary Worth is sooo mashup-able!
@181 Baja Gaijin:
Are you gonna have Mary slapping the hell out of Olive?
Not a mash up. I’ll leave that to you.
@182 Sequitur: SHUZH! Don’t spoil it for everyone!
@183 Baja Gaijin:
Nobody’s looking at this. You’ll steal the show tomorrow!